The Bill and Hillary Show

Last week was a typical wallow in Clinton excess. Bill spoke at Union County College in New Jersey. He said that “white, non-college-educated Americans need to be brought along to the future” and stop trying to “reclaim the past.” It was a familiar bit of racist condescension, making clear that in the mind of the Clintons the Trump supporters are backward and not very smart, and it was only lacking key words like “redneck” or “white trash” to make the point more emphatic. It was a sneer worthy of Barack Obama’s dismissal of flyover America’s connections to guns and Bibles or Hillary’s putdown of women who choose to stay at home to raise their children and “bake cookies or do teas.” The future that Bill foresees, as he made clear in his speech, is “an inclusive, non-divisive America — an America that is oriented towards our future greatness, not trying to reclaim a past that is past and gone.” It is, in short, an America that needs to abandon its own culture and values in exchange for a globalism and multiculturalism that has worked so well in many places, just ask the Europeans. Or better still ask the Clintons, who have become very, very rich off it.

So the Clintons see their future tied to a mishmash of a country that is, a possible contradiction in terms, both “inclusive” and “diverse,” which will keep them and their like in power for the foreseeable future as opposed to a nation guided by citizens yearning for a “past” in which Americans were safe in their communities, sent their kids to good schools and had well-compensated jobs with health and pension benefits. Normally I would respond “So what?” as a Bill Clinton vision is inevitably some kind of pander, but the real danger of a Hillary in power comes with her consistently belligerent view of America’s role in the world, her own track record while in office, and her apparent willingness to create international conflicts where none are called for. Though Hillary is not so insane as to want to risk a nuclear war, she embraces policies that incrementally increase tension with Russia and could easily produce one. In that respect, she is far more dangerous than either Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders.

Hillary’s foreign policy speech delivered in San Diego California last Thursday was in part a bowdlerized and embellished synopsis of her record but it was more than that a political statement. It was delivered in front of a massed array of American flags to a carefully selected audience, full of sound bites and laugh lines that will no doubt be excerpted and turned into campaign material. The speech was intended to highlight her “experience” vis-à-vis Bernie Sanders (who hopefully will trounce her in California today) and to dismiss Donald Trump as unfocused, ill-informed and dangerous: so “thin-skinned” that he might start a nuclear war on a whim. Even though the version of Hillary-confronts-the world is largely nonsense, it is inevitably being heralded by neoconservatives and the mainstream media, all fearful that either Bernie or The Donald will be elected and put an end to the corrupt and self-serving status quo.

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